Issues of concern to people who live in the west: property rights, water rights, endangered species, livestock grazing, energy production, wilderness and western agriculture. Plus a few items on western history, western literature and the sport of rodeo... Frank DuBois served as the NM Secretary of Agriculture from 1988 to 2003. DuBois is a former legislative assistant to a U.S. Senator, a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Interior, and is the founder of the DuBois Rodeo Scholarship.

Friday, June 01, 2018

A 64-year-old put his life savings in his carry-on. U.S. Customs took it without charging him with a crime.

A 64-year-old Cleveland man is suing U.S. Customs and Border Protection after agents strip-searched him at an airport in October and took more than $58,000 in cash from him without charging him with any crime, according to a federal lawsuit filed this week in Ohio.
Customs agents seized the money through a process known as civil asset forfeiture, a law enforcement technique that allows authorities to take cash and property from people who are never convicted or even charged with a crime. The practice is widespread at the federal level. In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential burglaries in the United States...The CBP agents led Kazazi to a small, windowless room and conducted multiple searches of him and his belongings, he said. According to Kazazi's declaration, the agents asked him to remove all of his clothing and gave him a blanket to cover the lower portion of his body. Kazazi said that a man wearing rubber gloves then “started searching different areas of my body.”
Kazazi characterized the search as a “strip search” in an interview translated by his son. “I felt my rights violated,” he said.
The searches turned up nothing — no drugs, no contraband, ddno evidence of any illegal activity, according to the lawsuit. But the agents took Kazazi's money. Even more alarming to Kazazi was that the receipt the agents handed to him did not list the dollar value of his cash...MORE

In 2017, federal authorities seized more than $2 billion in assets from
people, a net loss similar in size to annual losses from residential
burglaries in the United States.

It seems we've finally found something that the feds can do as well, or are even better than the private sector - THEFT.